The Halloween parties I attended this year were full, of course, of the classic sea of costume accessories. Innumerable cowboy hats, cat ear headbands and red berets floated atop the crowd. What wasn’t so classic is that those berets belonged to neither artists nor mimes, but rather to college students impersonating Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for New York City mayor who has taken TikTok by storm in recent weeks.
Sliwa finished third of the three candidates in the November election, earning a reported 7.1% of votes—independent candidate and former governor Andrew Cuomo took 41.6% of votes while Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate and future mayor of New York City, won with 50.4% of the vote. Sliwa earned an astonishing amount of social media attention over the course of his campaign. Yet those online fans clearly didn’t turn out to support him on election day. Why not?
Sliwa’s ascent to internet stardom began with clips of debates between the three candidates circulating on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels in the weeks before the election. Users took to parodying each candidate’s unique approach to answering questions, a concept which made it as far as SNL in the show’s Nov. 1 episode. These parodies generally consisted of a hypothetical question followed by a rational, if optimistic, answer from Mamdani, a slightly harsher and more conservative answer from Cuomo (with occasional references to his history of sexual misconduct), and, finally, an absolutely absurd response from Sliwa which inevitably referenced his 1992 run-in with an armed mafioso in the back of a yellow cab. As more and more coverage of and information about Sliwa emerged, NYC voters and casual social media users alike latched on to his unique combination of charismatic charm and unbridled insanity.
The native New Yorker ran on a platform emphasizing safety by way of increased police presence, along with “restoring integrity” in the city’s leadership and animal rights—Sliwa currently has six cats, and has had as many as seventeen at a given time. He’s consistently appeared in his iconic red beret since 1979, when, at 24, he founded a volunteer citizen safety group called the Guardian Angels. Sliwa also made it a point to incorporate common Gen Z slang terms in his interviews and debate appearances, repeatedly accusing Mamdani and social media commenters of “glazing” him—bestowing him unwarranted praise.
While Sliwa’s online supporters may not have cast actual ballots for him, they did express real compassion for his candidacy. In a TikTok video from CBS New York showing Sliwa’s Nov. 4 concession speech, commenters commended the kind words he shared for Mamdani and his positive attitude in the face of defeat.
“We have a mayor elect,” Sliwa says in the video. “Obviously, I wish him luck, because if he does well, we do well.”
“This is what the old Republicans with a spine are like. Respectful and about the people,” one commenter said. Another applauded Sliwa for “not selling out,” and another called him an “old school Republican,” claiming to have “mad respect for him even if I disagree with him.” In one of the most polarized moments of our nation’s political history, Democratic voters seem refreshed to see a Republican willing to concede an election respectfully—even if he earned less than 10% of votes in that election.
Sliwa’s place may not be the mayoral office, but he has undeniably built himself a dedicated base of supporters as he proceeds in future endeavors. As one TikTok commenter succinctly put it, Sliwa would definitely be a good fit for “something”—“not office, but something fun.”